Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Like Soviet One, Putin System Can’t Be Reformed, Only Destroyed and Replaced, Inozemtsev Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, April 24 – One of the many
debates that riled Western studies of the Soviet Union concerned whether that
system could ever be reformed or would have to be destroyed and then replaced
with something else.Some political
analysts insisted that of course it could be reformed, while those who came out
of the totalitarian school generally said that it couldn’t be.

Now, a similar debate has almost
certainly been triggered about the Putin system, with US-based Russian
economist Vladislav Inozemtsev arguing in an interview with Ekho Rossiya this
week that “reforming the [Putin] system will be just as impossible as it was to
reform the Soviet one” (ehorussia.com/new/node/16180).

The director of the Moscow Center
for Research on Post-Industrial Society says that Russia has an enormous
capacity to survive the kind of sanctions the West has imposed or shows any
sign of imposing in the future.Up to
now, the West has imposed them to satisfy domestic political needs rather than
to force Moscow to change, whatever politicians say.

Historically, Russia has gone
through the same cycle that it is repeating today.“Russian statehood when it was active in its
borrowing from the world beginning from Petrine times passed through several
stages,” he says. First, there arose a sense of being behind the world and a
certain modernization began.”

This “moved the country forward but
exclusively within those limits which guaranteed the possibility that the
authorities of the given time could strengthen themselves.” Then, as a result
of these reforms, the rulers recognized that they were threatened and began to
put on the brakes. Again and again, stagnation occurred.

After that lasted for “several decades,”
the sense that Russia is behind and must change things to catch up. That has
led to periods of reform which in the end could not be fully carried out
because the country’s “resources were exhausted.” As a result, there was decay,
convulsions and even revolutions.

“Today,”
Inozemtsev says, “we see exactly the same thing.” Reforms were working but they
had become a threat to the incumbent regime.And as 2011 approached – a year “analogous
to 1956 and the Soviet thaw” – the regime began to put on the brakes under
various pretexts: Crimea, the war with America and so on. This was the
legitimation of stagnation.”

When
the economy begins to decline and the standard of living along with it, the
Kremlin will undertake “a hopeless attempt to revive this system. I suspect,”
the economist says, “that this will not be undertaken while Putin is in office,
but I may be mistaken. If the situationwill get very difficult, perhaps it will happen even under him.”

“But
to reform this system will be just as impossible as it was impossible to reform
the Soviet system,” he continues, and therefore one must expect “major troubles.”
That is all the more so because the Russian Federation is far more cut off “economically,
socio-culturally and mentally” than was the Soviet Union at the end.

The
USSR, Inozemtsev says, “in the 1980s was a country quite near to the Western
world in its values however strange that may seem. These were not the values of
democracy, but they were the values of education, a definite quality of life
and an acceptance of the importance of technology and industrial development.”

It
“was part of industrial civilization. A split took place when the West began to
move into technological development and the Soviet Union remained mired in its
gigantomania, metallurgical factories and Trans-Siberian projects.”

But
today, Inozemtsev says, “this break is dozens of times greater.”Russians today “are not capable of producing
a large part of what the developed world produces: we do not produce even the
printer cartridges which are used to print out Kremlin laws.”

Moreover,
under Putin, Russia is mired in Orthodoxy and imperialist values, at precisely
the time “when the entire world is becoming tolerant and open.”At some point, Russia will hit a brick wall
and suffer the consequences, he continues.

Illarionov
says that he has “only one basis for optimism: Putin isn’t eternal. Personalist
regimes have a common feature: they do not survive their founders. You must be
ready for the fact that the system will collapse when its founder disappears.”
All the institutions he has created will “disappear.”

Some
people equate Putin and Russia and say without the one, there won’t be the
other. That is possible: there won’t be any Russia if the current process goes
on for much longer.

Unfortunately,
the Russian opposition doesn’t provide “any reason for optimism. It will not
overthrow this regime.”In many ways, he
says, the Putin regime and its opponents mirror one another. “For me,” Inozemtsev
says, “the figures of Putin and Navalny are identical, and leader cults [or either
kind] will not lead to any good.”